Welcome

Welcome to Stratum 4’s website. We are a professional consultancy dedicated to assisting industrial clients withinnovation in the digital age, providing guidance on thearchitecture and engineering of intelligent industrial automation (IA) systems and services.

In advancing production efficiencies, productivity and security in a broad range of industrial settings, IA systems employ enterprise-level architectures and operational strategies for automating the monitoring, analysis, supervision and regulatory control of real or synthetic value production processes.

Caveat 1: To paraphrase Bruce Schneier (CTO, IBM Resilient) in his January 27, 2017 New York Magazine essay "Click Here to Kill Everyone," there are compelling reasons to temper, if not in some cases reverse, the tendency to connect anything and everything to the Internet.

An unbridled IoT phenomenon, especially in automating industrial systems, contains a host of thorny unresolved issues concerning, among other technical, social and political concerns, matters of the reliability, privacy, safety, performance, integrity and accountability of resultant systems.

At the end of the 20th century we lived in a world of things, some with attached or embedded computers. At the beginning of the 21st century, punctuated by the 2007 emergence of the computationally powerful, mobile and now ubiquitous smart phone, we entered a world defined by computers with a growing number and variety of software-enabled things attached to them.

Where products previously contained less than 20% of their functionality defined in software, today it approaches 80%. Refrigerators are now computers with compressors that cool stuff. Ovens are computers the heat stuff. TVs are computers for interacting with streamed digital content. ATMs are computers dispensing currency – real and virtual. Cars are computers (actually, mobile networks of computers) connected to engines and wheels that move stuff. Power plants are computers that electrify stuff. Hospitals are computers, embedded with nurses, physicians and diagnostic devices, all for administering “health.” Factories are computers that make stuff, and enterprises are computers that convert value propositions to capital.

With this shift in paradigm the Internet is no longer simply (wonderously!) a packet-switched communications platform. It has become a global, distributed “cloud” computer, large, growing and decentralized, attached to an incredible array of software-defined “things” that alone and in concert act as “computational service systems” for the purpose of automating any physical or synthetic process that can be exactly specified.

These new Industry 4.0 solutions enable enterprises of arbitrary size to operate as Decentralized Industrial Organizations (DIO)., where individual DIO operate as collaborative members of permissioned peer-peer value production networks (e.g., supply chains) without need of a central authority. They may employ artificial intelleigence (AI) applications in implementing trusted, resilient and agile supply chain management regimes, resulting in the production and sharing of very large operational datasets (e.g., via data warehouses and distributed ledgers). Consequently, DIO must share cybersecurity (e.g., authentication and audit) policies and mechanisms, internally and among their collective behaviors, qualified by shared operational imperatives and governing algorithms (e.g., smart contracts.)

DIO are naturally linked horizonatlly along producer-consumer (supply) chains and vertically along superior-subordinate (accountbility) chains. They are intelligent (cognitive) to the degree they continuously maintain awareness of, and predictable performance in response to, a range situations unfolding within their operational ecosystem. Further, DIO may be stationary or mobile (in cyberspace-time), whether their services are embedded as components in other systems or function independently as distributed “end systems” at the edge of large-scale cloud-hosted service systems.